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This keynote speech explores the challenges faced by European higher education systems, including globalization, economic pressures, and changing governance modes. It also discusses contentious areas such as university funding, changing academic profession, and the expanding role of higher education. The speech raises questions about the future of market mechanisms, the role of new stakeholders, and meeting conflicting demands from different stakeholders.
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Keynote Speech:The Growing Complexity of the Academic Enterprise: Challenges AheadPolish EU Presidency Conference on the Modernisation of European Higher Education, Sopot, 23-25 October, 2011 Professor Marek Kwiek, Director, Center for Public Policy Studies, Poznan University, Poland kwiekm@amu.edu.pl
Introduction – Pressures (2) • Several interrelated factors: • globalization and Europeanization, • educational expansion and massification of HE, • the economic crisis and public sector reforms, and • knowledge-driven economic competitiveness of nations and regions. • External pressures exerted on higher education: • economic (financial) pressures • political (ideological) pressures • social pressures • demographic pressures.
Introduction – contentious areas (3) The most contentious areasinclude the following: • University funding in mass HE systems. • Question: Who pays? Who should pay? • Increasing role of cost-sharing (fees and loans). • Question: What is the future of tax-based systems? • Increasing role of third-stream funding. • Question: What is the current and future role of non-core, non-state income, both teaching-related and research-related? • Changing university governance modes. • Question: Is more managerialism and less collegiality expected?
Introduction – contentious areas (4) • Increasing delinking of teaching/research/third mission activities. • Question: Is the traditional link strong, and how systems can be internally differentiated by levels of research intensivity? • Changing academic profession. • Question: How far can differentiation processes within the profession go, following differentiation processes in higher education systems? • Further expansion of higher education systems. • Question: What universal higher education may mean for graduates, their job prospects and future trends in wage premium from higher education? • Higher education as a public/private good. • Question: What are the implications of viewing higher education as an increasingly private good?
Introduction – 3 questions (5) • Should European HE systems expect more market mechanisms in their functioning and expect new income-generating patterns? • What is the role of new stakeholders in higher education and how the teaching/research missions may evolve? • To what extent meeting conflicting demands from different stakeholders is a major challenge to the European academic profession.
Market mechanisms and new income-generating patterns (6) • European HEIs in the next decade may be responding to increasingly unfriendly financial settings by either cost-side solutions or revenue-side solutions. • A more probable response to possibly worsening financial settings is basically by revenue-side solutions: seeking new sources of income, largely non-state, non-core, and non-traditional to most European systems.
Market mechanisms and new income-generating patterns (7) • While the cost containment may be the state response to financial austerity, seeking new revenues may increasingly be an institutional response to the financial crisis on the part of HEIs. • The introduction of fees or their higher levels will be in the spotlight in those systems in which universities will be seeking additional non-state funding. • The postwar (Continental) European tradition was tax-based higher education, and (high-level) fees still look non-traditional in most systems.
Market mechanisms and new income-generating patterns (8) The University is no longer a quiet place to teach and do scholarly work at a measured pace and contemplate the universe as in centuries past. It is a big, complex, demanding, competitive business requiring large-scale ongoing investment (Malcolm Skilbeck).
Market mechanisms and new income-generating patterns (9) • Market forces in HE: on the rise worldwide and non-core non-state income of universities: on the rise too. • The form and pace of these transformations are different across the world, changes are of a global nature and are expected to have a powerful impact on HE systems in Europe.
New stakeholders, teaching & research (10) • Altered relationships between various HE stakeholders: the decreasing role of the state (e.g. in terms of funding), the increasing role of students and the labor market (for the more teaching-oriented sector of HE), and the increasing role of the industry and the regions (for the more research-oriented sector of HE).
New stakeholders, teaching & research (11) • Increasingly differentiated student needs – resulting from differentiated student populations in massified systems – already lead to largely differentiated systems of institutions. • The expected differentiation-related developments in the next decade may alter the academic profession in general, further increase its heterogeneity, and have a strong impact on the traditional relationships between teaching and research.
New stakeholders, teaching & research (12) • The social, political, and economic contexts in which universities function are changing, and so are changing student populations and educational institutions. • HE is subject to powerful influences from all sides and all – new and old alike – stakeholders: the state, the students, the faculty, employers, and the industry, • On top of that, HE s becoming a very costly business (“more income is always needed: universities are expensive, and good universities are very expensive”, Burton Clark, 1998).
New stakeholders, teaching & research (13) • The complexity of the academic enterprise in the next decade is that different stakeholders may increasingly have different needs from those they traditionally had. • HE institutions are thus expected to transform themselves to maintain public trust (and to have good rationale to use public subsidies).
New stakeholders, teaching & research (14) • HEIs are under pressures to compete for financial resources with other public services, also heavily reliant on the public purse. • Public priorities are changing throughout the world, and new funding patterns and funding mechanisms can be experimented with. • The trend of disconnecting teaching and research in HE, OECD datasets: “academic research might just become concentrated in a relatively small share of the system while the largest number of institutions will carry out little research, if any” (Stephan Vincent-Lancrin 2006).
Conflicting demands on the academic profession (15) • European universities will be attractive if they are able to meet current (sometimes conflicting) differentiated needs. • These needs sometimes seem to run counter to the traditional twentieth-century social expectations of the academic profession in continental Europe. • Attractive European HE systems will have to find a fair balance in expected transformations so that the academic profession is not deprived of its traditional voice.
Conflicting demands on the academic profession (16) • Differentiated student populations in Europe require increasingly differentiated institutions, and (possibly) different types of academics. • This might mean the decline of the high social prestige of higher education graduates (in millions) and of the high social prestige of most academics (in hundreds of thousands in major European economies). The universalization of higher education is already having profound impact on the social stratification of academics.
Conflicting demands on the academic profession (17) • The point is that the academic profession is at the core of the academic enterprise. • Universities are linking the world of learning and the world of work (Teichler 2008), as well as linking research and innovation. • But universities may become useless in the knowledge-driven economy if the academic profession is not fully involved in debates about their future and if the academic profession is not optimistic about its future. • This is what the logics of the political economy of reforms suggests.
Snapshots – summary (21) • The growing complexity of the academic enterprise may put the optimism still prevailing in most European systems at risk. And optimism will be needed in the midst of ongoing and envisaged reforms. • In ever more complicated settings, overburdened, overworked, and frustrated academics would not be able to make European universities attractive. Then the complexity would be even more complex than assumed here.
Snaphots – summary (22) • Emergent complexities, expected for the coming decade, directly or indirectly, refer to the academic profession. • Both academics and academic institutions are highly adaptable to external circumstances (with the necessary balance of change and stability always at play).
Conclusions (23) • First, the scope of changes expected for all major aspects of HE operations is much bigger than commonly believed. The changes envisaged by policymakers are structural, fundamental and go to the very heart of the academic enterprise. • Second, the growing complexity of the acadmeic enterprise is related to: • biggest public investments in history; • highest numbers ofstudents and academics in history; • high relevance to economic growth and job creation in knowledge-driven economies; and • increasing expectations from society and policymakers.
Conclusions (24) • Third, no one-size fits all type of answers to the dilemmas but (due to globalization, Europeanization and internationalization) idiosyncratic, specifically national answers to them are ever more problematic in the increasingly interconnected world. • Thank you very much for your attention.
